Even Hugo Chavez’s ghost fails to provide much help to Venezuelan ruler Nicolas Maduro, amid dwindling support and a faltering economy.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who proclaims himself "the son of Chavez," is proving to be an unpopular leader. "Chavez had charisma, which Maduro doesn’t,” says Susan Purcell, director of the Center for Hemispheric Policy at the University of Miami.

“Chavez had charisma, which Maduro doesn’t. I think he’s a genuine goof and a flake who’s trying to imitate Chavez if he can.”

Susan Purcell

director of the Center for Hemispheric Policy at the University of Miami

It began with a “little bird,” progressed to the mountains overlooking Caracas, detoured to a subway construction project in the Venezuelan capital, and now has resulted in the seizure of at least three chains of electrical appliance stores.

“It” is the odd and distinctly whimsical governing style of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, a man who proclaims himself to be “the son of Chavez,” by whom he means Hugo Chavez, the tub-thumping champion of South American socialism who died of cancer last March, at age 58, following 14 years as Venezuela’s domineering and divisive ruler.

It’s been a tough slog since, and Maduro’s mounting troubles represent a cautionary tale about the challenge of sustaining a political doctrine (in this case, an eccentric grab-bag of populist ideas collectively known as Chavismo) when the sole mastermind of that doctrine (Hugo Chavez) is dead.

“He is trying to hold together a government made to the liking of Chavez,” says David Smilde, a political science professor at the University of Georgia and a noted expert on Venezuela. “It has been difficult.”

It has been very difficult, especially when you consider the parlous state of the country’s economy. Despite its vast oil wealth, Venezuela is suffering hard times on almost every front. Inflation is raging, and black-market activity is burgeoning.

Meanwhile, the legions of highly motivated followers who used to back Chavez at every turn — swarming into the streets whenever their fervent chants and waving banners were required — seem to have dwindled to a fraction of their former numbers.

“Maduro has lost the uncritical support of a lot of the population,” says Smilde. “He’s lost the social movement, these mobilized people. They’re not out in the streets, fighting for him.”

At the same time, many of Maduro’s adversaries seem bent on discrediting him by any means possible, including a tactic borrowed from the playbook of some U.S. conservatives, sometimes known as “birthers” — those who remain stubbornly convinced that President Barack Obama was born somewhere outside the United States.

In similar fashion, their Venezuelan counterparts insist Maduro was born in neighbouring Colombia which, if true, would disqualify him from the presidency. So far, they have offered no proof.

Still, anyone who thought Maduro would somehow manage to narrow his country’s fierce partisan divisions has surely abandoned that expectation.

(One of the few features of the new president’s demeanour or appearance that both his critics and supporters can agree on is the highly impressive quality of his moustache, a rarity for Venezuelan presidents. Even Chavez, the master of machismo, was clean-shaven, and just one other man with a moustache — Luis Herrera Campins, in office from 1979 to 1984 — has ruled the country during the past eight decades. Make of it what you will.)

In an effort to rally his political base, Maduro has been obliged to play the Chavez card with ever-greater frequency, but with modest results so far.

“Chavez had charisma, which Maduro doesn’t,” says Susan Purcell, director of the Center for Hemispheric Policy at the University of Miami. “I think he’s a genuine goof and a flake who’s trying to imitate Chavez if he can. He’s even following some of Chavez’s wackier kinds of decisions, the so-called ‘magic realism’ aspect.”

Magic realism is the term for a distinctive trend in Latin American literature — a melding of realistic events with elements of the supernatural — that has long been associated with writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Isabel Allende.

Although far from being a writer himself, Venezuela’s new president does present himself as a man on intimate terms with the supernatural, at least if you credit his various claims to the channelling of Chavez’s ghost.

These putative experiences go back to Maduro’s campaign for the presidency last spring, when he famously declared that he had divined Chavez’s corporeal presence in the form of a little bird that flew several circles around him one day, warbling its encouragement.

Since then, Maduro claims to have seen his deceased mentor’s moon-faced visage gazing down upon him approvingly from the mountains overlooking Caracas. Earlier this month, he appeared on state TV with a smartphone photograph that supposedly depicted a likeness of Chavez’s features formed by indentations in a plaster wall at the Francisco de Miranda subway station, now under construction in the Venezuelan capital.

“My hair stands on end just telling you about it,” he said to the cameras. “Whose is that gaze? That gaze is the gaze of the father that is everywhere around us . . . So you see it is true what they say. Chavez is everywhere. We are Chavez. You are Chavez.”

Many Venezuelans ridicule such claims, but others are more receptive.

“For the average Venezuelan, the distinctions between this world and the next one are sort of porous,” says Smilde. “That’s par for the course in Venezuela.”

What’s harder to accept for many people is the now struggling condition of the economy in their oil-rich homeland. For months following his election, Maduro advanced few measures for dealing with the troubles, perhaps because of internal disagreements on the government side about how to proceed.

“With Maduro as president, in the first six months, it seemed the government was frozen,” says Smilde.

For better or worse, that seems to be changing. Mayoral elections scheduled for Dec. 8 will likely be viewed as a sort of unofficial referendum on Maduro’s performance, and this prospect may have sharpened the president’s resolve.

Earlier this month, Maduro dispatched the army — the army! — to seize control of three large chains of electrical appliance outlets in several Venezuelan cities, ordering the troops to enforce steep government-ordered reductions in the prices of the stereos, refrigerators and flat-screen TV sets.

Maduro was responding to an alarming rise in inflation, now reckoned to be sailing along at about 54 per cent annually, a calamitous trend that the president blames on his domestic political adversaries operating in cahoots with Washington, long Chavez’s favourite bête noir and now Maduro’s as well.

Maduro’s critics tell a different tale. They say the country’s soaring inflation results from currency controls imposed during Chavez’s rule that pegged the Venezuelan bolivar at the unrealistic rate of 6.3 to the U.S. dollar. With the greenback now in high demand, but in chronically short supply, its value on the black market has shot to nine or 10 times the official rate, wreaking havoc with the economy.

Forced to purchase imported goods at the lofty black-market rate, merchants say they have had no choice but to hike their prices, often by wide margins.

“They just don’t have enough dollars coming in,” says Smilde.

Meanwhile, the gaping disparity between the official exchange rate and its black-market counterpart has spawned a massive wave of profiteering.

According to a recent report in The Los Angeles Times, Venezuelans with the means to do so now simply hop a flight to Miami or Lima, where they can use their credit cards to acquire U.S. dollars at the official rate. They then fly home to sell those dollars on the thriving black market for a nine- or 10-fold profit.

It’s a money machine.

Just think: a purchase of $3,000 (U.S.) in Lima will cost a Venezuelan credit-card holder just 18,900 bolivares. Back in Caracas, those same U.S. dollars can be sold on the mercado negro for up to 180,000 bolivares.

The profits are so enticing, and so easy, that air travel out of the Venezuelan capital is now all but impossible.

“There is essentially no availability of air tickets out of Caracas until September 2014,” one travel agent told the Times.

“We’re going to comb the whole nation,” he said. “This robbery of the people has to stop. You haven’t seen anything.”

Although he opposes this approach, Smilde at the University of Georgia says it may well serve to bolster Maduro’s support among some sectors of the population, particularly those most faithful to Chavez’s memory, a potential boon in the upcoming municipal elections.

“I disagree with them,” says Smilde, “but these last measures are probably going a long way to galvanize Chavez supporters.”

As for Maduro’s decision to dispatch the army to take over retail outlets in aid of what is fundamentally an economic issue, this seems to be part of an emerging trend.

According to Maria Esperanza Hermida, a co-ordinator at a Caracas-based human rights organization called Provea, Maduro’s brief tenure in office has already coincided with an erosion of individual liberties and an increasing militarization of the political system.

“Those who exercise their right to protest are criminalized,” she says. “We see a militarization, restrictions of liberty. It’s a political situation that is continuously more asphyxiating.”

A one-time transit employee who later became active in trade-union organizing, Maduro met his political idol for the first time in 1992, when Chavez was in prison for his role in a failed coup. Following his eventual release, Chavez ran for the presidency in 1999 — and won. He appointed Maduro as foreign minister in 2006.

Six years later, an ailing Chavez named Maduro as his vice-president.

This past March, the former army paratrooper with the outsize ego lost his long battle with cancer, and Maduro inherited the fiery political legacy of Hugo Chavez — an awkward and difficult fit for a man blessed with far more moustache than personal mojo.

“Maduro has control of the state,” says Smilde, “but many no longer feel they have a boss.”